How to enable Operator Connect calling and conferencing in Microsoft Teams

As you may be aware, Operator Connect is Microsoft’s latest innovation for directly providing telephony and conferencing to your organization’s users in Teams. It offers a complete modern voice solution, and we were delighted to have been selected as one of Microsoft’s launch partners when it launched last year. What’s made it such a game-changer is how quick and easy it is to enable Operator Connect.

In this article – and the video below – you’ll see just how easy it is. With Operator Connect, you can add calling and conferencing capabilities to your Microsoft Teams environment within hours.

Enable Microsoft Phone System

The main gain from this new Microsoft solution is that with Operator Connect you can select an operator (telephony provider) directly from the Administration Portal in Teams. However, to do this you’ll need to have a Microsoft Phone System subscription enabled. You may already have this as part of your users’ E5 license. If not, you’ll just need to purchase a Microsoft Phone System add-on and assign it to the relevant user(s).

Choose your operator

When choosing an operator, you will want to find the one that best suits your required services and the countries for which you need coverage.

To do this, just look in the Administration Portal. There, you’ll see the available ‘marketplace’ of operators and this list of available providers will update as you refine your geographical or service requirements.

You could choose to ‘mix ‘n’ match’ and have more than one operator but this will probably not be your best option. After all, an additional benefit from Operator Connect is the opportunity to simplify your contractual state and reduce the overall administrative burden dealing with several providers.

Business-critical add-ons as standard

We’re confident that our offering will be your ideal choice, not least because we offer calling plans in 39 countries (and growing fast). In addition, we provide geographic toll numbers in 90+ countries and toll-free access in more than 100, enabling audio-conferencing access in 140+ countries. We back this up with ultra-competitive pricing, possible because of our global telephony footprint. Our carrier-grade capability is backed by a choice of support services to provide you with the help you need. For more on this, read about why you should choose NTT for Operator Connect.

If your organization uses a Contact Center and relies on efficient inbound call handling, then you will also welcome the toll-free Call Queue and Auto-Attendant features that come with the service numbers that we provide. Furthermore, if you want to keep your existing conferencing access numbers, you can port them across to our platform.

Among other compelling reasons to choose us as an operator are the business-critical add-ons that we provide. These are not things that come as standard, but additional features we believe you might expect and need. These include compliance recording and also Cloud Video Interoperability (CVI). This latter feature is vital if you want to allow legacy H323 / SIP room systems to join Microsoft Teams meetings.

We are also able to provide Dynamic E911, where applicable; a crucial safety measure that can provide a user’s precise location to emergency service responders.

Check your configuration

Once you’ve chosen, you’re almost done! You will just also need to check you’ve chosen the right configuration. This means enabling ‘Teams Only’ mode at the user level (as a minimum) or the tenant level.

Confirm your consent

After this, you just need to confirm your consent. And that’s pretty much it. The service is now activated and will soon be ready for use.

The video below shows a quick walk-through of these steps. It’s a short video and rightly so because with Operator Connect enabling telephony within Microsoft Teams has never been easier.

Operator Connect: taking Teams telephony to another level

As great as the quick and easy set-up is, remember this is just part of the story. The bigger picture is that Operator Connect lets you consolidate and modernize your telephony and make considerable savings. Do be sure to read more about Operator Connect from NTT and contact us if you’d like to get started.